The 8 Most Impressive Video Game Reveals You Missed This Weekend

Whatever you thought of this weekend’s debut Game Awards, it lured a sufficient number of respectable game studios, who brought with them more than a few intriguing announcements and never-before-seen trailers. Multiply by all the new material Sony trotted out at its first ever PlayStation Experience (also this weekend), and the ordinarily news-lethargic first weekend of December turned out to be full of surprises.

Here’s a look at the most impressive announcements and trailers from both shows:

Adr1ft

Everyone’s comparing 505 Games’ Adr1ft to Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, because both involve someone in orbit floating through the wreckage of who-knows-what. Best case scenario? We’ll get to play a video game that one-ups Cuaron’s Gravity (which needlessly mangled basic scientific principles) by making rigorous physics per the hostile extremes of orbital space the game’s unremitting antagonist.

Drawn to Death

Drawn to Death is a “hand-drawn arena shooter.” That’s how The Bartlet Jones Supernatural Detective Agency studio lead David Jaffe describes it, anyway. It’s impossible to tell how (or whether) the game’s going to set its gameplay off from other arena shooters, but it certainly looks unique.

The Forest

Alpha versions of The Forest have been playable since May on Steam, but the open-world survival game’s surprise confirmation for PlayStation 4 could signal a 2015 final release. In the game, you’ve survived a plane crash only to find yourself stranded in the wilderness who-knows-where, and observed by strange, debatably hostile, behaviorally nuanced (in unprecedented ways) humanoid creatures.

Hazelight

Hazelight–is it the name of the game and the studio?–was a monumental tease that offered no indication whatsoever about the sort of game two guys sitting on a boxcar having a smoke and moon-gazing amounts to. But it’s by one of the lead developers of Brothers — A Tale of Two Sons, and that alone makes the clip worth including here.

No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky may turn out to be a gorgeously vast patina of a cosmic exploration game, given its claims of procedurally generated galactic play-space times infinity. No one’s yet come close to grappling with fundamental design paradoxes whereby escalating randomness correlates negatively with player interest (imponderable haphazardness = boundless blah). But we’re still in “imagine what if” mode, and this latest trailer offers new wrinkles for consideration: a planet with purplish protuberances and another with undulating topography, a two-legged Star Wars-ian robot/vehicle and walk-in warp points.

Tacoma

If you watch Tacoma’s trailer and think “Hey, Bioshock!” some of the game’s developers actually worked on BioShock 2. But given what they pulled off with Gone Home last year, I presume we’re in for something mind-bending. A lunar transfer station run/built by “Virgin-Tesla”? As in Richard Branson plus Elon Musk? Could we be in for another futurism-skewering interactive narrative?

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

So Uncharted 4 looks nuts, and I say that as someone who doesn’t give a hoot about graphics in games nowadays. Sony wanted to make an impression, and boy did it: there’s over 15 minutes of “yes, you’re really seeing what you think you’re seeing” impressing going on in this actual-gameplay-rendered-using-a-PS4 video. And check out the creepy prehistoric-looking jungle. All that’s missing: a cameo by King Kong.

Zelda Wii U

If Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. saved the Wii U from oblivion, Zelda Wii U (we don’t know it’s official name yet) could be the game that clinches its comeback. It’s a shame Nintendo didn’t offer an alternative fullscreen view, but even watching this video of a video, it’s clear the new Zelda’s going to be vast–and judging from that quip about horses not running into trees, it’s aiming to remedy slipshod genre conventions (like heinous equestrian controls).

See The 15 Best Video Game Graphics of 2014

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Activision's futuristic first-person shooter in which players take on a rogue private military company uses a brand new engine built specifically for PCs and new-gen consoles to handle its cutting-edge lighting, animation and physics.

Sledgehammer Games/Activision

Far Cry 4. This pulled back shot of fictional Himalayan region Kyrat is in-game, believe it or not, rendered with an overhauled version of the engine Ubisoft used to design Far Cry 3.

Alien: Isolation
Built from scratch, the Alien: Isolation engine's outstanding deep space visuals all but replicate the set design of Alien film concept artists H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb's work.

The Creative Assembly

Assassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft says it "basically remade the whole rendering engine" in its AnvilNext design tool to handle the studio's meticulous recreation of Paris during the French Revolution.

Ubisoft

Child of Light
Inspired by filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki and artist Yoshitaka Amano, Child of Light's hand-drawn artwork puts the lie to presumptions that graphical richness depends on shader support or polygon counts.

Ubisoft

Destiny
Built from scratch by ex-Halo studio Bungie, Destiny's game engine was designed to scale across the next decade, says the studio.

Bungie

Mario Kart 8
Nintendo's kart-racer for Wii U reminds us that raw horsepower is just a facet of crafting a beautiful game world.

Nintendo

Infamous Second Son
Sucker Punch's freeform Seattle-based superhero adventure models all sorts of minutia, from the intricate wrinkling of an aged character's face to the way eyelids stick, slightly, before separating when characters blink.